I suppose one could say it's a story about the people who work with the animals at the animal control center, but I would like to focus on it being all about the animals. Heh.
This is Paul Yoon's 'War Dogs' published in The New Yorker on October 20, 2024. Set in an animal control center at a New York airport over the course of one afternoon in early June, we have young Brian who works with the dogs, and 19-year-old Tess who works with the horses. They're lovers, partners and colleagues. They wondered if a 'war dog' by definition is a dog who works for the military.
Right now, Brian doesn't want to talk about his parents with Tess who wanted to know about the death of his father and how his mother is doing landing in Seoul right now. Tess also can't seem to tell him why that she is unable to stomach her favorite an egg sandwich anymore, which is what Brian made for her for lunch. She's extremely bothered and confused.
In an interview with the same magazine, a question was asked of the author if he deliberately set the story about animals and traveling,
The chief animal protagonists in this story are two dogs and a polo pony. Their cognition can seem almost human at times. Was that a deliberate decision? Did you ever worry about anthropomorphizing them—or is that something that doesn’t have to concern a fiction writer?
The decision was deliberate, in that I’ve also been interested in how certain fables are crafted and work, but I was always weighing whether I was anthropomorphizing the animals in this story too much, whether certain choices I was making from their points of view were, in fact, my own human point of view rather than, say, pure dog. This is actually something I think about all the time—too much of the time, probably. I’ve been lucky enough to have had experience with horses because my wife is a rider, and I feel very comfortable around them, and dogs have been in my life in some form ever since I was in high school. I went to a boarding school where one of our dorm heads had a dog who really took care of us; I dog-sat all through college; and now my wife and I have a dog named Oscar who is ten years old. There isn’t a moment that goes by when I don’t wonder if I’m a hundred per cent accurately translating his gestures and expressions. But another part of me also trusts that because Oscar has been in my life for ten years, I do know him—or, at least, I feel that we have a strong bond, that we know how to communicate with each other, and so I tried to bring that trust and our years of living together into the story, too. Which is to say, there’s a little bit of Oscar’s personality in both of the dogs in this story. And maybe a little bit of Oscar in the pony, too.
We have Ramsey the Argentine polo pony who's a frequent flyer, and two mixed-breed fifty-pound five-year-old dogs (a brother and a sister) who in came in from Afghanistan via Berlin, and needed some rehydration and rest. The dogs' owner remained missing although he was supposed to come in with them.
The story also moves to looks at Brian's mother Mary, who's flying into Seoul, and would be collecting a box that her late ex-husband had left for her, and finally meeting his other new family. There's this whole section about Brian's childhood growing up in Jackson Heights NY with his Mom doing shifts at the Korean restaurant, and why she left the estranged drunk husband and father-to-Brian, and how Brian doesn't want to go to college. Then there's Roger, Tess's father who's a veterinarian at this facility who has his own story about his father and some dog. He also sees Tess being kicked in the chin by Ramsey the pony when he reared up.
The author added in the Korean word 'gwisin'. Google tells me that 'gwisin' refers to spirits or ghosts, specifically people who have died. Are all of us haunted by giwsin metaphorically because we have regrets and we will always feel indebted to some family member or owe someone an emotional debt or something?
Do all contemporary writers write like this? I can see why. But it's confusing af. After a while, I can't tell if it's the dogs who are doing the thinking or the humans who want to escape their own ghosts. They all become one story at the end.
The dog imagines leaving this unknown place, slipping past the fence, taking with him his sister, whom he can still hear, in a corner room in the building behind him, dreaming, the way he can hear birdsong and other dogs and a vacuum and horses and music from headphones and the notification sound of a computer and a man’s faint shouting and a woman saying a word he doesn’t recognize.
What he can’t hear are the passengers waiting for their flights in the main terminals or the people getting ready for their shift at a restaurant in Jackson Heights or the cows on a farm in upstate New York or Mary’s reaction when she opens a box and looks inside or the door to his old home crashing open and his owner, who worked as a translator for the Americans, being dragged out by three men who force him to lie face down on the dirt road as they shout that he’s a traitor and then fire a rifle at the back of his head.
He cannot hear any of that. He fixates on the woman in the grass on the other side of the building saying that word again as she is helped up. He waits for her to say something else. He waits for his sister to wake. Staring out beyond the pond, from where a breeze is approaching, his belly full and this young man’s heart beating loudly beside him, he waits for his name to be called.
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